not, but----"

"Then put the whole thing in my hands, sir. I'll ask leave off to-morrow
and pop over and see her. I'll arrange for her to come here the day
after to see you. Leave it all to me. To-night you must write the
letters."

"Letters?"

"Naturally, there would be letters, sir. It is an inseparable feature of
these cases."

"Do you mean that I have got to write to her? But I shouldn't know what
to say. I've never seen her."

"That will be quite all right, sir, if you place yourself in my hands. I
will come to your room after everybody's gone to bed, and help you write
those letters. You have some note-paper with your own address on it?
Then it will all be perfectly simple."

When, some hours later, he read over the ten or twelve exceedingly
passionate epistles which, with the butler's assistance, he had
succeeded in writing to Miss Maud Chilvers, Roland came to the
conclusion that there must have been a time when Mr. Teal was a good
deal less respectable than he appeared to be at present. Byronic was
the only adjective applicable to his collaborator's style of amatory
composition. In every letter there were passages against which Roland
had felt compelled to make a modest protest.

"'A thousand kisses on your lovely rosebud of a mouth.' Don't you think
that is a little too warmly colored? And 'I am languishing for the
pressure of your ivory arms about my neck and the sweep of your silken
hair against my cheek!' What I mean is--well, what about it, you know?"

"The phrases," said Mr. Teal, not without a touch of displeasure, "to
which you take exception, are taken bodily from correspondence (which I
happened to have the advantage of perusing) addressed by the late Lord
Evenwood to Animalcula, Queen of the High Wire at Astley's Circus. His
lordship, I may add, was considered an authority in these matters."

Roland criticized no more. He handed over the letters, which, at Mr.
Teal's direction, he had headed with various dates covering roughly a
period of about two months antecedent to his arrival at the Towers.

"That," Mr. Teal explained, "will make your conduct definitely
unpardonable. With this woman's kisses hot upon your lips,"--Mr. Teal
was still slightly aglow with the fire of inspiration--"you have the
effrontery to come here and offer yourself to her ladyship."

With Roland's timid suggestion that it was perhaps a mistake to overdo
the atmosphere, the butler found himself unable to agree.

"